Review: Hollywoodland

UK release date: 24th November

Though it has all the hallmarks of a film noir — a gumshoe, a mysterious death and not one but two femmes fatales — Hollywoodland doesn’t quite fit the genre bill. Instead, it’s more a poignant love letter to the glory days of Tinseltown, personified by George Reeves (Ben Affleck), a struggling bit-part player who found fame in the 1950s as TV’s Superman.

The film takes liberties with the facts of Reeves’s life, starting with his apparent suicide in 1959 and telling his story in flashback through the eyes of private eye Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), who is hired by Reeves’s mother to look into her son’s death. Simo uncovers three possible alternatives, all hinged on Reeves’s involvement with a rich, powerful and married woman (Diane Lane).

Despite the convincingly dark, smoky atmosphere to Simo’s investigation, Hollywoodland works better when it’s evoking Reeves’s heyday — a cosmetically genteel world of zoot suits and jazz bands, in which the studio system protected its investments at any price.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 125mins

Review by Damon Wise

News: Diane Lane

The actress probably still best known for either 1983’s The Outsiders or the 1989 Western TV mini-series Lonesome Dove is on good form in this week’s Hollywoodland, although the role is probably too small to see her land another Oscar nomination to add to her one for 2002’s Unfaithful.

She has a fair few more projects in the works, however, including the potentially promising action thriller Killshot, where she’ll play one half of a couple in a witness protection programme who are tracked down by hitmen Mickey Rourke and the insanely promising star of last year’s superb high school noir flick Brick, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with additional roles for the likes of Rosario Dawson and Jackass‘ Johnny Knoxville.

Also sounding promising is Ed Harris’ directorial follow-up to his critically-acclaimed 2000 biopic Pollock. Other than Harris, who will star as well as write and direct, Lane will appear alongside Viggo Mortensen in the Western Appaloosa, based on the novel by Robert B. Parker about two friends appointed to police a small town, which is set to start filming in Autumn 2007. We need more Westerns these days – it’s amazing after the success of TV show Deadwood that more aren’t on the way.

News: Johnny Knoxville

The man most associated with the Jackass brand has been doing a decent enough job of turning himself into a genuine film star that it’s amazing his agent still lets him take part in such dangerous antics.

Next up, he’ll be appearing ain a small role longside Ben Affleck, Diane Lane, Mickey Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Rosario Dawson in hitman comedy caper Killshot, but it will be his film after that (assuming that rumours of his casting are true) which could finally give him his proper movie break. Based on an accalaimed series of graphic novels, Hawaiian Dick is set in a stylised 1950s version of the islands, with down-on-his luck detective Byrd trying to cope with the surprising amount of crime he finds himself surrounded by. If it goes ahead and Knoxville can pull it off, it could just see him hit the A-list…